Beware The Ides of March...

It's hard to know what to say about the ongoing crisis in Japan without sounding trite. I can't even imagine the horror of the whole thing, and frankly, I don't want to. I continue to be humbled before the brave stoicism of those affected directly by this; I don't know if things would be the same if this happened in an American city. If an agnostic's prayers count for anything, they've got them.

What do we even call it? The Sendai Earthquake-Tsunami-Volcano-Radiological Disaster of 2011? The Great Embuggerance? And seriously, what the hell? For crying out loud, Universe, didn't Japan have enough bad karmic crap happen to it in the 20th century?

I've been watching the coverage pretty much non-stop since it happened; BBC and NHK mostly. (The American networks have been mostly useless. CNN is close, but they're trying too hard to tart up the story, as if it needed it.) Every time there's some sort of crisis, I take to the news like a crazed junkie. I feel really ghoulish doing it, but it verges on compulsion.

The thing of it is that I'm this way about a lot of things. A quick scan of my personal library shows more than a few books on plagues, catastrophes, sociopathy, psychopathy and other horrors. My husband makes fun of me: I can't watch horror movies, as obviously fake as they are, but I will watch all sorts of documentaries about disasters and serial killers. He actually asked once, "So you can only watch when it's actually happening to real people?"

But it's more complicated than that.

I can't NOT look, when something terrifies me. I'm getting better about flying, but at the depths of the phobia, I was infinitely more comfortable in a window seat staring at the ground, the better to see that it was still 30,000 feet below me. Once, when I went to visit my friends who live at the top of the HILL of DEATH in Colorado, my friends drove me back down the HILL of DEATH so we could go to the pub. They noticed that my conversation was becoming increasingly disjointed, and looked to see my eyes transfixed on the edge of the cliff we were driving along, and they said, "Just don't look!"

But I have to. It's like somehow if I keep my eyes on the Peril, that I'll be able keep it at bay.

Irrational, I know, but there it is. So you're on notice, O Great Embuggerance, that I'm watching you.

Watching the ongoing coverage does make doing a customer-service-related job somewhat awkward. It is VERY tempting, when someone calls in crying, "OMG I'LL DIE IF I CAN'T GET TO FACEBOOK THIS HAS RUINED MY WHOLE DAY I HOPE YOU'RE HAPPY!" to respond with something along the lines of:

"Just shut the fuck up and move to Sendai."